Looking Up: You can win the astronomic lottery from your backyard

I consider myself one of those people who is a jack of all trades, and a master of none. I have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of many things, but I’m not going to go win Olympic gold in snowboard cross, even if a major part of winning is simply not falling down in competition.

The top contestants in those sports typically train for hours every day, doing the same runs over and over again until they become experts, which as you can imagine, doesn’t allow time for much else.

Similarly, for most sciences, you need a solid foundation starting as far back as high school. To make great contributions to the fields of biology or oceanography, scientists typically study the basics for years and then go into jobs where they continue to hone their knowledge to get to the top of their field. They have access to expensive, top-of-the-line equipment that allows them to experiment and make new discoveries.

But astronomy is one of the few sciences where amateurs can still grab the spotlight.

Sure, most major revelations are made by those with access to time on the Hubble Space Telescope or fancy lab equipment, but a fair number of discoveries can still be made with a backyard telescope and a decent camera, or through gazing at photos online. This is mostly due to the fact that a lot of astronomy is looking at the right place at the right time, or taking the time to comb through the vast number of stars in the sky.

Amateurs gazing up at the sky from dark places around the world have captured images such as the start of a supernova, the explosion of a star, that no other scientific platform observed. They have discovered new planets in orbit of distant stars and recorded impacts of asteroids on Jupiter as they happened, giving scientists new insights on the process (once those videos were uploaded to YouTube).

New galaxies and comets have also been discovered and named after the amateur astronomers who first revealed their existence to the world, such as comet Hale-Bopp, which was named partly after Thomas Bopp, a construction manager who was looking up in the Arizona desert in 1995 and realized that something was moving across the sky a little too quickly to be a star.

You don’t have to shell out a lot of money on a telescope and camera to be part of the action, either. A number of research discoveries have come about from online crowdsourcing projects, where volunteers take a look at the millions of images taken by various observatories when there are simply too many to be combed through by seasoned astronomers.

These types of volunteers have uncovered early star-forming regions, allowing NASA a way to see new stars and solar systems as they form to further our understanding of the process. Another group discovered a rare type of galaxy called “Green Peas,” which scientists later realized were some of the most active galaxies around for star formation.

If you want to check out some of the online projects, you can visit the planethunters.org website, or visit zooniverse.org for a bunch of space options, from hunting for comets and supernovae to classifying galaxies to help us understand how they form.

I love that astronomy is one of those sciences where anyone with a serious interest can go out and potentially see something in the night sky that could be hailed as the next big discovery. You can win that lottery without having to focus solely on one interest and still have time for a world of other experiences.

Looking up this week >> Mercury and Venus have reappeared in the night sky this week and can be seen very close together in the west just after the sun goes down. Jupiter will rise around midnight and stay until dawn as the brightest celestial object in the sky. Mars and Saturn will both rise in the east in the early hours of the morning. Sunrise is at 6:27 a.m. this morning, with sunset at 6:07 p.m. The moon is currently a waning gibbous and will be third quarter tomorrow.